Celia Britton

Publisher:

Liverpool University Press

DOI:10.5949/liverpool/9781781380369.003.0009

In these novels Glissant addresses the problem of the absence of a collective sense of identity in Martinique through the development of a collective narrative voice. Since the communal solidarity which such a voice implies does not in fact yet exist, it has to avoid imposing a false coercive uniformity; rather, it must be sufficiently fluid and flexible to include all the characters’ voices and, ideally, situate them in relation to each other. The three novels discussed here embody different phases of this search for a communal ‘nous’, from Malemort's despairing, indeterminate and fragmented ‘nous’, through the more vigorous and structured quest for collective identity in La Case du commandeur, to Mahagony's staging of a plurality of individual narrators existing in relation to each other and its metadiegetic critique of the two earlier novels. All three demonstrate the political relevance of the formal category of narrative voice.

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